Wisconsin native, conservative critic of everything.
"Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God." ---G K Chesterton
"The only objective of Liberty is Life" --G K Chesterton
"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions" --G K Chesterton
"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Weigel on Christianity's Gifts to the West

Professor Burleigh proposes that Christianity gave theWest cosmopolitanism and egalitarianism, for it recognized“neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free” as relevantsocial categories – and thus blazed a path beyond tribalismand toward the end of slavery, that ubiquitous humaninstitution.

Modern feminism notwithstanding, Christianity also gavethe world ... feminism, for St. Paul completed his instructionon Christian egalitarianism by reminding the Galatians that,in Christ Jesus, neither “male nor female” had a superiordignity – which, in that context and in much of the worldtoday, means that Christianity is the great liberator ofwomen.Christianity, as Pope Benedict reminded us recently, gavethe West the idea of charity as a personal and socialobligation; think of the world of cruelty graphicallycaptured in “Gladiator,” and you’ll see the point.

Christianity also gave the world a politically viableconcept of peace, the peace that St. Augustine first definedin the fifth century as the “tranquility of order.”

Christianity taught that rulers were responsible, not tothemselves alone (as so many rulers liked to think, then andnow), but to transcendent moral norms. Would the conceptsof the rule of law, and of rulers responsible to the law, haveevolved in the West if, as Professor Burleigh reminds us, “theredoubtable Ambrose, archbishop of Milan ... [had not]tamed the Emperor Theodosius?”

Or, to cite the more familiar example, if Gregory VII hadnot confronted Henry II and forced him to recognize thefreedom of the Church – a freedom that implies limits onstate power? It seems unlikely, not least because these ideasdidn’t gain currency in the rest of the world until they werebrought to the rest of the world by Christians.

Why was this insistence on the Church’s liberty sosocially, and ultimately politically, important? Because thefreedom of the Church meant that the state (or some otherform of concentrated political power) would not occupyevery available social space – that there would be room insociety for other institutions and other loyalties. And that, inturn, made both civil society and the limited, constitutionalstate possible.

There are implications, of course. First off, a proper understanding of Western society is based on the "moral order" (supplemented by positive law) which the Church brought into play. A proper understanding of peace is not "absence of conflict," but "tranquility of order," which is akin to "rule of law."

Obviously, the "rule of law" is dependent on a moral order--which just happens to be identical with the Natural Law.

And as the Soviet Union found to its dismay (and dissolution,) pretending that there IS no Natural Law behind the moral order and underpinning Natural Law has its consequences. The Pope did not send one of his "divisions" into the USSR for it to come apart...although Ron Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were quite helpful, it was Lech Walensa, armed only with a compelling moral order, who pulled the pin.